Lord Beaverbrook: Churchill’s Confidant and the Most Influential Canadian of WWII

The War Cabinet at No. 10 Downing Street in London on Oct. 15, 1941. Standing second from right in the back row is Lord Beaverbrook, Minister of Aircraft Production, while Prime Minister Winston Churchill is seated second from left in the front row. AP Photo/File

Commentary

Sir Maxwell Aitken, the 1st Baron Beaverbrook, was the most influential Canadian of World War II.

Canada produced other powerful men—generals, politicians, and even spies whose names are well-known: William Lyon Mackenzie King (from Berlin, Ont.) was a wartime Prime Minister, Sir William Stephenson (Winnipeg) was a brilliant spymaster high up in the U.S.-U.K. alliance, and General Bert Hoffmeister (Vancouver) was among a handful of Canada’s reserve soldiers who became a great division commander.

But Aitken, who grew up in Newcastle, New Brunswick, was at Churchill’s right hand in the cockpit of power during the “Finest Hour,” and in charge of aircraft production during the crucial epic Battle of Britain.

Nicknamed “Max” or “the Beaver,” he was one of Churchill’s closest confidants.

After the surrender of France on June 25, 1940, Great Britain and the Empire stood alone against the Third Reich. Faced with the threat of invasion across the English Channel, the island nation by July fell under heavy air attack by the Luftwaffe, the German Air Force.

Churchill had been prime minister since May 10. With the powerful oratory for which he is famous, he encouraged the British people to be brave and to do their best, so that future generations would look back upon the crisis of September 1940 as their “Finest Hour.”

It’s a powerful myth that has stuck. Both Churchill himself (a prolific historian), his official biographer Martin Gilbert, and many political leaders tapping into the Churchill legend, have extolled the story. It has the benefit of being true in broad brush strokes. (Its fallacies are a topic for another article.)

Max Aitken was a self-made man, a successful investor, newspaper magnate, and rich friend of great leaders. Having made his fortune he moved to England, where he already knew British cabinet minister Andrew Bonar Law, also from New Brunswick. Law was the leader of the British Conservative Party for a decade and Prime Minister of Great Britain from 1922 to 1923. Aitken was elected as a Conservative MP in England in 1910 and served as a cabinet minister in two wars. Made a peer in 1917, he was generally known as Lord Beaverbrook.

His personal finest hour occurred during World War II when, at a key time, he was the prime minister’s daily companion over dinner or for brandy and late-night conversation. Even great men need the cheer of friends—and Churchill was a generous convenor to men who were misfits like himself.

Statue of Lord Beaverbrook in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Salvador Alejandri/Shutterstock

Though born into the aristocratic Marlborough family, the maverick Churchill was in many ways an outsider to conventional politics. It’s hard to believe in hindsight, but he was bitterly reviled by the British establishment before he became the heroic orator and leader of 1940 to 1945.

Churchill’s inner circle remained loyal to him in the wilderness years (1929–1939) when he was an MP but held no cabinet post. At that time, even Aitken declared Churchill a “busted flush.”

Still, as early as 1930, Churchill was one of the few who recognized the threat posed by Adolf Hitler, a rising rabble-rouser, anti-Semite, and leader of the Nazi Party, which increased its share of the German vote from 2.6 percent in 1928 to 18.3 percent in the 1930 elections.

Churchill perceived the threat of a resurgent Germany to the balance of power in Europe. As John Lukacs recounts in his book “Churchill: Visionary, Statesman, Historian,” the balance of power—preventing the preponderance of any single continental power or “bully” from dominating Europe—had been British policy “for 400 years.”

By 1940, it was too late to prevent Hitler from dominating Europe. He already did.

With Churchill’s romantic view of history, including his own destiny in it, he appreciated Beaverbrook as a buccaneer rather like himself. Both were mischievous pirate-patriots in the mould of Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Francis Drake, adventurers in Churchill’s dramatic bestselling epic “History of the English-Speaking Peoples.”

Churchill had confidence in Aitken’s success—his brash “ability and ruthless will,” as biographer A.J.P. Taylor put it—and so he made him his Minister of Aircraft Production from May 1940 until April 1941.

There has been much debate around whether Aitken was really the wizard of aircraft production that the Churchill myth (and the Beaverbrook myth) claimed. Aitken’s “personal force and genius,” Churchill wrote, “swept aside many obstacles,” firing and sidelining bureaucrats to get his way.

Taylor counted Aitken “among the immortal few who won the Battle of Britain,” who, “at the moment of unparalleled danger … made survival and victory possible.” Sir Hugh Dowding, in charge of Fighter Command, praised the Beaverbrook effect as “magical.”

In reality, as I have pointed out in The Dorchester Review, the credit for success should be shared with Sir Archibald Sinclair, Secretary of State for Air from May 1940 until 1945, and especially Sir Wilfrid Freeman, who ran production under Beaverbrook.

Freeman quickly understood Aitken’s manic methods and overriding goal to produce five key aircraft—the Wellington, Whitley, and Blenheim bombers and the Hurricane and Spitfire fighters—at the expense of other models, spares production, and maintenance. (Pre-1940 production and spares had been failing, and many of the changes credited to Beaverbrook were in fact recommended by Freeman.) Freeman himself admired Beaverbrook’s “ruthless way” in ordering that damaged aircraft be cannibalized for working parts rather than repaired, and that materiel held up by bottlenecks should be promptly expropriated.

And no one questions that Aitken brought to bear private sector energy, hiring dynamic men such as Patrick Hennessy from Ford UK, Trevor Westbrook from Vickers, and G.C. Usher from International Combustion to pressure and often to go around the military bureaucracy. Beaverbrook himself took no salary, and paid many of his staff from the payroll of his Daily and Sunday Express newspapers.

When Beaverbrook was informed that several experienced engineers on Ludwig Loewy’s team were German Jews who had fled to England in 1938 but were now interned as enemy aliens, causing production delays, he sent a group of German-speaking Jews into the internment camps to obtain their release on his say-so, and put them to work in his department.

Beaverbrook’s loyalty and that of other misfits, like the Irish-born Brendan Bracken, meant a lot to Churchill during the first 14 months of his premiership, when he remained surrounded by disloyal onlookers hoping he would fail.

Churchill described Beaverbrook as his “tonic,” someone who kept him buoyant, a “real help and spur.” “Some people take drugs,” he said, “I take Max.” Together they understood the mission of the world empire of liberty led by Britain, “her message and her glory.” He called Beaverbrook his “foul weather friend” and the Battle of Britain his own “hour” of triumph.

It was a first step on the road to victory over Nazism five years later.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.